The Biography of Mikhail Bulgakov

The author of this book is the outstanding Russian literary scholar, Doctor of Philology Marietta Omarovna Chudakova (1937–2021). "The Biography of Mikhail Bulgakov" was published in 1988 — it was the first time the writer's biography was presented in such a coherent and comprehensive manner. Readers had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with archival documents, testimonies from people surrounding the writer, fragments of his diaries and letters (which were not published at that time), and most importantly — to assess the true scale of Bulgakov's personality, without the censorship of gloss and ideological omissions. Today, it is hard to even imagine the efforts it took M. O. Chudakova to gather all the factual material we have at our disposal today. To this day, this book remains the most authoritative study of Bulgakov's biography. It has been translated into other languages, but in response to numerous offers from Russian publishers, M. O. Chudakova declined: she hoped to prepare a revised version of the text, but did not have time to do so. Nevertheless, this edition accounts for the author's corrections to the text, preserved in a copy from the Chudakov family library.